In 1847, a rather breathless British travel writer, a Protestant named Susan Minton Maury, published her Statesmen of America in 1846 and was sufficiently impressed (not to say awed) by New York City's bishop, John Hughes, to devote twenty-five pages of her book — more space, in fact, than she gave to Daniel Webster, Chief Justice Taney, William Seward, or Martin Van Buren — to someone she described as “the historical man of the day” and the most impressive cleric in America. With his name appearing regularly in national newspapers, Hughes was certainly the most talked-about clergyman in the country.

Politicians took notice. Twenty senators and thirty-three congressmen invited the bishop that December to speak before Congress, an invitation that had been offered only once before to a Catholic prelate, to John England in 1826. Among those who signed the invitation were John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun, Lewis Cass, David Wilmot, Stephen Douglas, and Thomas Hart Benton, as well as the Speaker of the House, Robert Winthrop. “I do not feel at liberty to decline a compliment,” Hughes answered, “with a wish so kindly expressed on your part and so flattering to me.” His now-closest friend among the episcopate, William Walsh of Halifax, was visiting New York at that time and accompanied him to the capital.The invitation — like the jubilation that greeted Pius IX’s ascension — suggested that times might be changing; more than a few of those men, including the ailing former president and Massachusetts representative, were known to have made anti-Catholic remarks in the past, some of which had been reprinted in the Freeman’s Journal. Despite inclement weather, the floor and gallery of the House were filled with a standing-room-only crowd when the bishop took to the podium on December 12 and observed in his audience not only the noted men who had invited him but such equally prominent figures as the great orator Daniel Webster. It was a shining moment for John Hughes. Exactly thirty years earlier, a poor immigrant had disembarked to begin a new life not so many miles from the capital. Now, for two hours, he had the ear of many of the country’s leading figures.For this occasion, Hughes knew enough to avoid remarks that could give offense to any group and to avoid any mention whatsoever of Mexico or the famine exodus. Not surprisingly, then, “Christianity: The Only Source of Moral, Social and Political Regeneration” pleased everybody — except, of course, Jewish and Protestant evangelical readers and those nativist legislators appalled at the lack of judgment the leadership had shown in letting a Catholic priest address Congress in the first place. Correspondents as far away as Ireland read of the speech and sent their plaudits.

Change, so much of it uncontrollable and most of it unpredictable, was fast becoming the order of the day. The violence that overtook Europe in the “year of revolutions” (1848) demanded any American bishop’s attention no less than the war or the famine exodus. When Louis-Philippe was forced to abdicate in February and fled to England, republicans in Europe and the United States hailed the end of the French monarchy; the Catholic hierarchy on both continents was less sanguine, fearing the coup would inaugurate another brutally anticlerical period in France. When Metternich fled Vienna and Emperor Ferdinand was forced to abdicate, the cheers in the American press were even louder. The fight of Hungary to break free of Hapsburg rule was a cause dear to the heart of progressive Americans. A new Europe seemed to be in the making almost overnight as Danes forced an end to their absolute monarchy, Germans demanded constitutional rights, Italians rose up against their Austrian overlords, and even in John Hughes’s homeland a new group — the Young Ireland movement — announced that the day of Daniel O’Connell’s tepid parliamentary efforts to secure freedom from Great Britain belonged to the past, like the great man himself who had died two years earlier, and that the time for more forceful resistance had come.

Hughes had multiple concerns about these developments, even when some of them seemed positive enough at first glance. First, there was the question of their origin in physical violence. Cobblestones torn up, soldiers attacked, and crowds fired upon, houses of authority besieged, civilian martyrs to liberty: these might be images that some could romanticize, but he looked upon them as deeply troubling. New York City was still a tinderbox itself, populated with people too volatile — including many of his co-religionists and fellow Irishmen — for their own good. Men who should know better, like Horace Greeley, acted as if the violence that saw the success of their liberal causes was always justified, even inevitable. New Yorkers had fashioned a city grown too accustomed to violence, Hughes insisted. They lived in a time where men could burn down a theater and turn Astor Place into a site of carnage to make a point — a point that cost twenty-five people their lives — about which actor, a native American or a suspect Briton, had the right to play Macbeth before New York audiences. This was not the moment or the place, he felt, to glorify blood in the streets over legislative reform or a Burkean gradualism. The fact that so many of the radical movements in Europe, particularly in Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Italy, were overturned the following year simply confirmed Hughes in his judgment about the mistaken glamour of revolutionary violence.

Then there was the problem of the expectations that were raised by a rapid rearrangement of the social and political terms men had long lived under. In Italy, this issue was especially evident with the tenuous position Pius IX had been placed in. When the movement to unite the peninsula under republican rule began, many Italians assumed the new liberal pope would give his sanction to raising arms against Austria, which occupied large sections of the peninsula in the north and the south. Though privately pleased when it seemed as if the Austrians might be dislodged from Italy in a timely way and with minimal bloodshed and willing initially to commit a small number of his troops to the cause, Pius quickly concluded that events were spiraling out of control. He was horror-struck at what the ravages of a full-scale war in Italy would unleash and let it be known he could not countenance a nationalist attack against a fellow Catholic nation. He scorned the politicians’ talk of a “holy war.” The nature and extent of his progressivism had been misread. Thus, to republicans, the papal hero became a papal traitor in the space of a few days — in both Italy and in the United States. When one of his chief ministers was stabbed to death in the fall, and the Swiss Guards were finding it harder each day to restrain the discontented crowds outside the Quirinal Palace, Pius decided Rome was no longer safe for him and fled in disguise to Gaeta in Neapolitan territory controlled by Austria. Giuseppe Mazzini arrived in Rome, a republican government was proclaimed, and once again, echoing events of the Napoleonic years, a pope was in exile.

To someone intent on binding men and women to a view of the church as the bedrock of a sane life, as a source of allegiance deeper than all others, this was a calamitous development. Hughes’s goal of fostering civic, ethnic, national, and religious pride was going to lose one — for him, the most crucial — of its four pillars if, for the second time in fifty years, a pope could no longer occupy the center of Christendom without fearing for his life. Hughes took to the pulpit and the lecture platform to raise money for Pius, now cut off from most of his revenues. Greeley complained that this fund-raising was playing into the hands of the Austrians, as the collected funds would go to bolster the antirepublican cause. There was even some discussion among American bishops of inviting Pius to seek asylum in the United States.

An Italy without the pope was almost impossible to contemplate. Unnaturally raised political expectations had the potential, then, to cause the greatest harm of all in the eyes of a Catholic bishop — an alienation from one’s faith. It was bad enough when this occurred among Italians, Hughes felt, but even worse when it transpired among “his people,” the Irish. The men of the Young Ireland movement were idealists who led the least formidable of that year’s uprisings. Some accounts of this momentous year in European history don’t even mention their efforts, for a plausible reason. The Irish “1848” moment was a debacle and a humiliation. And when it was all over, some of the participants wanted to lay the blame for their defeat on Ireland’s Catholic clergy. They seemed to be suggesting that the Irish would be better off without their priests, that the church stood for passivity and opposition to change. This sentiment Hughes found intolerable.

The Young Ireland leadership was a disparate, fractious group of journalists, poets, politicians, firebrands. Most—Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Thomas Francis Meagher, Richard O’Gorman, Michael Doheny, Joseph Brenan, Thomas Devin Reilly, Charles Gavan Duffy — were Catholic, while some, like William Smith O’Brien and John Mitchel, were Protestant. What they had in common, inspired by developments in France, was a sense that their time had come. Unfortunately, they had a poor grasp of timing and seriously underestimated the willingness of a famine-stunted population to see 1848 as the year in which to take on the might of the British Empire. Their moment of defiant confrontation, such as it was, took place in midsummer in the tiny village of Ballingarry in Tipperary, where the Irish constabulary was attempting to arrest one of the group’s leaders. Young Ireland men showed up ready to prevent that. The group envisioned an uprising across the island when the people heard of their eagerness to fight back. Nothing of the kind happened.

The “battleground” was the house and backyard garden of a local widow where the constables initially took cover and then emerged to subdue an outnumbered band of armed rebels without much difficulty. British troops hadn’t even needed to be called in. The ignominy of the situation was impossible to deny. Parisians had brought life to a halt in their capital and sent a king packing; Irishmen had been vanquished by forty-odd paramilitary volunteers in Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch. “Every Irishman from Maine to Texas who has taken the slightest interest in the cause,” Hughes complained when he read of the pathetic rout at Ballingarry, “must blush and hang down his head for shame.” The press on both sides of the Atlantic agreed.

The attack on the Widow McCormack’s house on Boulagh Common, Ballingarry, County Tipperary. (Currier and Ives)

Adding fuel to the anger Hughes felt was the fact that he had attended, in company with Horace Greeley, a rally that summer at the Vauxhall Gardens in Manhattan where he delivered a rousing speech on behalf of the growing opposition to the Crown, expressed the hope that Ireland would not wait much longer to enjoy its freedom as a sovereign nation, and contributed $500 of his own money to be sent abroad to the movement’s organizers. On a visit to New Orleans to see his old friend Bishop Blanc the next month, he participated in a rally that raised$6,000. He knew that Bennett and other editors would never let him forget that summer of excitability and gullibility — and he was correct. Now he urged his parishioners to withhold money from Irish political groups and not to attend any more rallies until saner, more intelligent men were leading a movement with a better grasp of reality. Enough damage had been done by a wild-eyed “set of Gasconaders.” He tried to get his $500 back and have the money sent to the Sisters of Mercy in Dublin.

Then the gasconaders started arriving in New York — Thomas D’Arcy McGee in the fall of 1848; Michael Doheny and Joseph Brenan in 1849; Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel later after they had been tried and exiled and escaped from their confinement on Tasmania. They arrived ready to put their extensive journalistic expertise to good use and — McGee especially — didn’t give much thought to which opinions it might be wise to air and which to hold back. Within weeks of landing in the city, McGee found some backers and brought out the first number of the Nation, a paper modeled on a Dublin version with the same name. Then he started slashing away. One target was the clergy at home who had failed to rally round the Young Ireland banner. “The present generation of Irish Priests,” he wrote in a January 1849 editorial, “have systematically squeezed the spirit of resistance out of the hearts of the people.” All things considered, that was one opinion worth holding back.

In a series of letters published in the Freeman’s Journal beginning the next week, Hughes responded to McGee’s accusations. Rather than publishing under his own name, a response he felt might be lacking in dignity, he signed himself simply “An Irish Catholic,” but he made sure that McGee was apprised of the identity of his formidable opponent. The Young Ireland crowd knew perfectly well, he asserted, “that the Irish clergy never gave [them] any reason to suppose they would join them.” The priests of Ireland “had no more idea of committing themselves and their flocks to the issue of a bloody struggle with the overwhelming power of the British Empire than the people of England had... seeing, as they must have seen, the certain and inevitable consequences of a movement so nobly conceived but so miserably conducted.” Weak men looked for scapegoats. Boys playing at soldier caused irreparable harm to serious causes. Any man who tried to lure good people away from their faith, as if deserting the Catholic Church could actually help pave the way for an independent Ireland, was not to be trusted. He also charged McGee and his crowd with having kept the Catholic clergy at a distance from their activities when it suited them in the hopes of gaining Protestant followers. McGee was no better than “the cutthroats who had expelled the Pope from his capital.”

In February, a nervous McGee tried to make amends. He assured the bishop that he was a loyal son of the church and that his political and spiritual beliefs were entirely separate, and he promised to temper his remarks. He beseeched Hughes to stop the onslaught of bad press. Peace of a kind reigned for a few months, until McGee found it impossible to refrain from writing what he truly believed. After learning that many Irish bishops were planning to participate in the official welcome to Queen Victoria on her visit to Ireland, he described them in the Nation as “vermin engendered by bad blood and beggary.” When he didn’t back down a second time, Hughes went after the paper more directly, denouncing it from the pulpit as an infidel publication and instructing his clergymen to make sure that no one in their parish subscribed. He hit his mark. Readership dropped off by the week. Early the next year, the Nation folded and McGee left for Boston, where he made a second short-lived foray into American journalism with the American Celt.

Hughes wasn’t the only man in New York glad to see McGee depart for another state. McGee’s relations with other Young Ireland exiles, always a contentious bunch, had soured and even turned violent. Some found his anticlericalism unseemly and counterproductive, while others thought him too moderate in his Fenianism, too critical now of how the movement had botched its attempt at rebellion the previous summer. Michael Doheny, one of the most militant of the group, encountered him on the street one day and pushed him down a flight of stairs into a building’s cellar. McGee took him to court. Joseph Brenan challenged him to a duel. McGee took to carrying a gun.

Daniel O’Connell had been a Gulliver, Hughes mourned, misguided though his abolitionist sympathies were. The Young Ireland men were Lilliputians. And, worse, Lilliputians who squabbled among themselves and did it in public, the last thing an Irish-wary city needed to see. He warned the Irish of New York to steer clear of them. If Hughes’s best efforts couldn’t stop McGee from being himself, he did manage to make some of the other exiles think twice about following in McGee’s footsteps. When Michael Doheny arrived in the United States, he was similarly vocal in his anger at the clergy of Ireland for not urging their parishioners to take a stand against the British until he saw the reach of Hughes’s influence. “He was at first red hot about the priests,” fellow nationalist Charles Hart wrote in his diary about Doheny, “and when he heard the sort of fix in which McGee then was owing to his contest with the bishop, [he] changed his tune.” Yet Hughes’s powers of intimidation extended only so far. Invited to a dinner party at the episcopal residence whose guests included Hart and Orestes Brownson, Doheny “arrived quite tipsy” and acted, Hart said, “in a very disgusting manner... treating the Bishop with a rude and vulgar familiarity.” These Irishmen, Hughes realized, were not an easy bunch to tame.

John Hughes’s life story is peopled with individuals who should have been his soul mates in a common struggle but, as a result of circumstances and timing, were not. Thomas D’Arcy McGee is potentially one of these. A prodigy of energy and nerve, he had come to the United States for the first time in 1844, for a year, to edit the Boston Pilot at the age of nineteen. Hughes read his columns and, in 1845, had favorably reviewed McGee’s book O’Connell and His Friends. He might well have had hopes for a young Irishman of such fertile intellect, impressive literary and oratorical skills, and right-thinking opinions, which included a hatred of anything British and a skeptical view of unbridled capitalism. The two loved acidic language, hyperbole, unpopular causes. They even shared the same feelings about the new practice of celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day. A day named after a saint that involved no religious observances but plenty of fighting, drinking, promenading, and “frothy orations” did nothing, McGee had argued in 1845, to help the reputation of Irish immigrants. Unlike Hughes, who was in a far less advantageous position to do so, McGee was willing to take Americans of Irish descent to task, often in blistering language, for their parochialism, ward-boss politics, anti-intellectualism, and indifference to education, hygiene, and middle-class decorum. Advancement, he insisted, meant putting aside a victim mentality and cultivating self-scrutiny and self-improvement. Here was a man after an Irish bishop’s heart. By 1848, though, McGee was in a different place in his thinking on many issues. He was back in Ireland and had become more politicized and more radicalized. He didn’t want to wax ecstatic about Daniel O’Connell anymore, and he was impatient with his countrymen who weren’t ready to stand up to their British masters. Then came Ballingarry and his flight to the New World.

The antipathy between Hughes and the Young Ireland men had a profoundly ironic dimension to it in that both sides agreed on one important idea that Hughes felt should be reiterated as often as possible: namely, the validity of what the twentieth century would term a hyphenated identity.

Hughes wanted the Irish immigrant to see himself as an American with all the rights and the respect for his country’s past and its potential that any native-born citizen experienced. But, at the same time, he saw nothing meritorious in any immigrant’s desire to play down his Irish origins, his interest in the fate of Ireland, his love of Ireland. Irish Americans, he hoped, would form a new social/political entity in the West, and their vitality, their passion and energy, would benefit both the United States and Ireland. McGee, Meagher, Mitchel, O’Gorman, et al. would not have disagreed. In fact, in 1851, when McGee published his immensely popular History of the Irish Settlers in North America, the first book to be written about the Irish in the United States, he went beyond Hughes in his propagandizing on the point, producing what his best biographer called “a masterpiece of myth-making, which could easily have been entitled How the Irish Saved North American Civilization.” Though the book covered its topic to the year 1850, McGee made sure to mention Hughes only in passing.

McGee’s Boston paper, the American Celt, was likewise intended as an explicit attack on the alleged purity of the country’s Anglo-Saxon roots. “In choosing the name this paper bears,” he wrote, “we mean to adopt the opposite side of a popular theory, namely: that all modern civilization and intelligence—whatever is best and most vital in modern society, came in with the Saxons or the Anglo-Saxons.... When the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ cease to claim America as their exclusive work and inheritance, we will cease using the term ‘Celt’ — but not sooner.” Thomas Francis Meagher echoed McGee: it was the Celts’ “democratic antipathies... against the Gothic, brutish George III [which] produced the American Revolution.” Nativism, John Mitchel likewise affirmed, wanted to deny the fact that “a variety of hardy races and diverse faiths” had built the real America. Like Hughes, Mitchel saw the charge that the Irish could not function in a democracy as ludicrous: “There is no section of the foreign population,” he wrote, “who so truly appreciate Republican institutions as the Irish.” Young Irelander Richard O’Gorman threw himself into New York electoral politics and Catholic charities.

Life in another hemisphere eventually led these young men down very different paths. Meagher, once he had renounced his erring ways, became quite friendly with Hughes and went on to become a brigadier general in the Civil War and the acting governor of the Montana Territory, where he hoped to found a New Ireland and died under mysterious circumstances in 1867. Mitchel, who had moved to Tennessee and then Virginia, became an outspoken defender of slavery and sided with the Confederacy. Hughes thought him a contemptible man. O’Gorman became a Tammany judge and Boss Tweed crony; Brenan, a New Orleans newspaper editor. McGee left the United States for Canada before the Civil War and became one of the founders of the Canadian Confederation. A member of the Canadian Parliament, he was assassinated in 1868 at the age of forty-three and is a prominent name in the history of Irish Canadian politics. Hughes’s regard for these men and their colleagues was always conditional, dependent on whether or not they were eventually willing to stop criticizing the clergy and accept, if they were true Catholics, the embrace of the church.

Yet even after McGee experienced a change of heart and became a few years later an ultramontane Catholic and staunch spokesman for parochial-school education, he and Hughes maintained an on-and-off relationship, sometimes admiring and more often wary. The warmth Hughes came to feel for Meagher, a generous soul, he could never feel for McGee. In 1852, McGee gave up on Boston, too, and relocated to Buffalo, where he tried his luck —not much better — with another bishop.

John Loughery is the author of three books, Alias S.S. Van Dine, John Sloan: Painter and Rebel, and The Other Side of Silence: Men’s Lives and Gay Identities, a Twentieth Century History, the last two of which were New York Times Notable Books. His biography of John Sloan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

Today on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich interviews Scott Sherman about his new book, Patience and Fortitude, and the fight to save the New York Public Library.

Thanks for sitting down with us, Scott. Why don't you start by telling us about your own relationship to the New York Public Library?I moved to New York City in 1991, and four years later decided to launch a career as freelance writer. Looking for a place to work, I began to frequent the grand library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, which soon became my second home. Most of the day I worked in the Rose Reading Room, and then I retreated to the Periodicals Room to look at the day’s newspapers. I loved the building: the slanting light in the Rose Reading Room; the majestic staircases; the eccentric cast of characters at the long wooden tables; and — most of all — the fact that there were three million books in the seven levels of dense stacks directly beneath the Rose Reading Room. Most books could usually reach me in two hours or less. It was bliss.Okay, now to the headline: tell us about the controversy at the NYPL. One morning in the spring of 2010, I was approached by a librarian I had known slightly for years. He was familiar with The Nation and knew I wrote for it; he also liked to chat. To my surprise, he leaned over and whispered into my ear: “Our trustees are planning to sell the library across the street” — by which he meant the Mid-Manhattan Library, a decrepit facility on 40th Street and Fifth Avenue. “It stinks,” he continued. “You should look into it. Do it soon.”I was busy with other projects, and let his tip go. But a year later I was offered a chance to profile Tony Marx, the incoming president of the NYPL. Two weeks into my research, I immediately grasped what the librarian had tried to tell me a year earlier: the NYPL’s trustees — aided by Booz Allen, a corporate consulting firm — had conceived a grandiose renovation plan. The 42nd Street library would undergo a renovation in which the three million books would be sent to an offsite storage facility in New Jersey. The old stacks (which are a marvel of engineering), would be demolished and a new, modern library would be built in the space that, for a century, had held the books. The price tag for this was $300 million. To cover the costs of this Central Library Plan (CLP), two nearby libraries would be sold: the Mid-Manhattan Library and the Science, Industry and Business Library on 34th Street. The whole scheme was a castle in the sky — a doomed plan by library trustees who were indifferent to books, public space and scholarly research, and who were determined that the NYPL should get its share of the spoils from a soaring Manhattan real estate market. The CLP was immediately contested by a small group of citizens — historic preservationists, bookworms, retired librarians, writers, grassroots organizers — who fought the plan for two years and, in the end, built a diverse coalition against the NYPL. They convinced the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, that the plan was ill-conceived, and in early 2014 de Blasio told the NYPL it could not proceed with the sale of a major public asset — the Mid-Manhattan Library. That library is now undergoing a $500 million renovation, a triumph for the activists and for all New Yorkers. The activists also saved the old stacks at the 42nd Street library.The aborted CLP cost the NYPL, by its estimate, $18 million. My own estimate is much higher. NYPL’s architect, Norman Foster, kept $9 million for a renovation that was never undertaken. It was too late to rescue the beloved Donnell Library, on 53rd Street, which was sold off, for a pittance, in the earliest phase of the CLP in 2008, three years before the public learned about the plan.

You first reported this story in The Nation, and then expanded on it forPatience and Fortitude. What sources did you use to build the narrative?First I contacted former and current staff members. When I approached one librarian for an interview, he replied with some irritation: “I can’t do an official interview with you, since my bosses would skin me. But if you invite me out to lunch, I won’t say no. I can eat lunch with anyone I choose to!” We went to an Irish pub around the corner and he unleashed a torrent of criticism, concluding: “The whole building is a single architectural masterpiece. The CLP would basically destroy half the library.” He was just one of many people at the NYPL who spoke with me.

When I expanded the article into a book, I read Phyllis Dain’s history of the NYPL. It was published by the Library in 1972, but it’s an independent work of scholarship. There are some fine, charming, mid-century memoirs written by senior NYPL librarians. Philip Hamburger’s two-part New Yorker profile of Vartan Gregorian, who led the NYPL in the 1980s, finely evoked the Library’s internal culture and atmosphere. I was dependent on the archive of The New York Times and astonished to see how deeply the Times had reported on the entire NYPL system — not just the four research libraries, but the many branch libraries around the city. Starting in the 1950s, the Times produced between fifty and a hundred stories a year about the NYPL, every year. I found the Times’s online database cumbersome to use, so I relied on the bulky red hardcover volumes of the Times Index, which never failed me.

Under New York State law, public libraries must surrender their trustee meeting minutes. I relied on those printed minutes for my Nation reporting. They were oblique and fragmented, but provided me with facts, dates and further paths of exploration; studying them, I experienced some of the excitement that historians must feel in the archives. When I started writing Patience and Fortitude, I obtained the minutes of the NYPL’s executive committee, which is where the real power resides. Many NYPL trustees were disengaged from the nitty-gritty of the CLP; the most powerful trustees, though, sat on the executive committee, and I learned a lot from the minutes of their closed sessions. I also attended the trustee meetings, which are open to the public, although guests are expelled from the room when the board goes into “executive session.”

So, tell us more about the role writers, intellectuals and historians played in this war.

The CLP was announced at a 2008 press conference featuring longtime trustee Toni Morrison. I suspect that the NYPL’s then-president, Paul LeClerc, gave Morrison an incomplete account of what the CLP would eventually entail. I can’t be sure of this: LeClerc and Morrison declined to speak with me. Real estate developers, hedge-fund managers and wealthy individuals dominate the NYPL board, but the board also contains many prominent writers and editors. At the time of my reporting, the most prominent intellectual was Robert Darnton, who was the only trustee who communicated with me — on the record — throughout the period 2011-14, when the controversy was raging. At first, Darnton was a loud advocate of the CLP, but he later came to feel that the critics were right. I chronicled his trajectory in Patience and Fortitude.

Some of my interactions with NYPL trustees were extremely strange. At a trustee meeting in Harlem in 2013, I introduced myself to Henry Louis Gates Jr. and asked him for his thoughts on the CLP, which had become very controversial. He glared at me, leaned over, and whispered into my ear: “You don’t want any trouble, do you, guy?” Then, with a beaming smile, he turned his back and greeted his fellow trustees.

Historians were notably active in the battle against the CLP: Joan Scott, Stanley Katz, David Nasaw, David Levering Lewis, Anthony Grafton, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Edmund Morris, Thomas Bender, Cynthia Pyle, Blanche Cook. As the controversy was winding down, E.L. Doctorow and Art Spiegelman produced acidic critiques of the CLP. Annalyn Swan, who, with her husband, Mark Stevens, won a Pulitzer for a biography of Willem de Kooning, was also deeply involved in the defense of the NYPL, and remains so today.

Not long ago, the commentator Matt Yglesias shot off a half-snarky, half serious tweet about how “If they didn’t already exist, public libraries would strike people as the most outlandish left-wing idea.” There seems to be a grain of truth in there somewhere. What do you think?

The people who designed and built the 42nd Street Library from 1895-1911 were not left-wingers. The Library was, in large part, the creation of John Shaw Billings, a physician who served as an army surgeon during the Civil War. Billings was a polymath whose interests included hospital construction, sanitary engineering and medical bibliography. Phyllis Dain called him “probably the most versatile librarian the United States has produced.” In that era, the Library’s board consisted of men like Lewis Ledyard, J.P. Morgan’s lawyer and Edith Wharton’s cousin. Ledyard and his fellow trustees were pillars of the Manhattan establishment who were determined to create a library in New York as great as the British Museum. Certainly there were utopian elements in that scheme: the trustees wanted the NYPL to contain the world’s most outstanding books, manuscript collections and printed materials. To a great extent they succeeded.

Today, it is unwise to talk about public libraries in left-right terms; a great many Republicans are devoted to libraries. Librarians themselves have a sense of duty that transcends politics and ideology.

You’ve written about the neglect of the NYPL’s branch libraries. Update us on their condition.

The NYPL is structurally complex: it operates four research libraries and nearly one hundred branch libraries. Four different entities are responsible for the upkeep of the neighborhood libraries: the NYPL, the Mayor, the City Council and private philanthropists. It’s an inefficient system. A lot depends on what individual Council members can and will do, and the wealth of a given neighborhood. SoHo has a modern, attractive, high-functioning branch library, but East Harlem does not. Lately the NYPL has made a real effort to improve some of the branch libraries: they did an admirable job renovating the branch on 160th Street in Washington Heights. But the branch libraries in the Bronx are in very poor condition.

Library users, all over the city, must exert pressure on their elected officials to spend money on the branch libraries. Those users should not sit back and wait for the library activists, whose numbers are small, to do that gritty political work for them.

Where do matters stand with regard to the stacks at the 42nd Street Library?

Three million books were quietly emptied from the stacks in 2012 and 2013 to make way for a renovation that never occurred. It happened under a cloak of secrecy. Today, the stacks are mostly empty. I hope the NYPL takes the high road and returns those three million volumes to their original home. Some NYPL-watchers are optimistic that the books will come back. David Nasaw recently told me that “this piece of midtown real estate is too valuable to stay empty.” I hope he is right.

​Let's start with the obvious question — what motivated you to write this book? The book came from my study of early American history, which I began in the middle of the 1990s. Previously to that, I had been a professor at some universities, but I had left teaching and writing and had gone into business. When I sold my business in the 1990s, I began my work on early American history full time, with no distractions. I spent years, really, just reading. One of the things that struck me was that, so far as the Revolution was concerned, the naval aspects of it were just left out. There was very little written about it. When I first discovered this, I thought that I hadn’t done enough work, that of course there’d be books, but that wasn’t the case. So I started reading everything I could about the naval aspects of the war. I discovered that they were very important, and that the histories we ordinarily read had left them out because their authors had not studied them, and had not seen how important the naval aspects of the Revolution are, from beginning to end, from Lexington and Concord to Yorktown. The naval aspects of the Revolution were equally important as the land side of it. I began writing about this, and I think my reviewers were a little puzzled because it really was new territory. But one person who recognized it early on, of course, was George Washington. ​

And why focus on the Hudson? My main example was always the Hudson. The Hudson fascinated me, because literally everyone who wrote about the Revolution believed that the Hudson was of enormous strategic importance. Washington did, all the British politicians and the king did, and later historians did. They believed the Hudson was the key to victory for the British, that if they could control the corridor from New York City to the Saint Lawrence, New England would be cut off and the Revolution defeated.

At some point, I knew that I was going to write a book explaining that this simply wasn’t true. It was not only a strategy that could never have worked, that being fixated on it actually cost the British the war. I focus on the great naval battle on September 5, 1781, prior to Yorktown off the Virginia Capes, in which the French bested the British. I believe their defeat there was intimately connected to the Hudson. That was my conclusion.

One of the historians who studied this as much as me was Thomas Fleming, who was a fan of mine from the beginning. He liked my first book, and loved this one. He honored it as the best book on the Revolution for 2016 at his New York Revolution Roundtable. Fleming passed away last summer, but I wish he’d had a chance to see my forthcoming book, which demonstrates that there was a naval component to Lexington and Concord. Tom was a great human being, and an old swabby (in the Navy in World War II).And how did the British obsession with controlling the Hudson actually cost them the war? What was wrong with the Hudson strategy? One of the people who thought the way I do about the Hudson was the British naval commander Lord Howe. Sadly, there’s no good biography of him, in part because there is so little interest in the naval side of the Revolution. Howe was one of the great British admirals; Horatio Nelson thought he was the best. Lord Howe and his brother, General Sir William Howe, were supposed to carry out the King’s plan to make quick work of the Revolution by gaining control of the Hudson-Champlain corridor to Canada. When Howe got here and took a look at the whole situation, he thought it was a fantasy, that the navy simply couldn’t do it. The warships that he had couldn’t begin to do all the things he was supposed to do on the Hudson. So he and his brother never tried. They of course couldn’t tell the king what they planned, and historians have criticized them for not carrying out the King’s strategy. In 1776 and 1777 they just did not attempt to meet a British army coming down from Canada at Albany. It’s never been said anywhere, but the fact was that the brothers thought that this was a sure way to lose the whole war.

Even if they had tried, it could never have worked, in the sense of controlling the Hudson and the territory between New York and Montreal. Something they knew, which I point out, that the King and historians never do, was that the population north of Westchester was hostile. How were you going to possibly control the Hudson if the population all the way to Manhattan was hostile? The Howes thought you couldn’t do it. A big part of their strategy in New York City and the lower Hudson, in fact, was to win over the population. This was not the King’s strategy. They wanted a political strategy, but they never got one. They agreed with me, but they never wrote it down anywhere. People then and now have noticed that they didn’t carry it out, but have criticized them and laid it to their stupidity. They don’t, as I do, think they were correct. In 1778, the Howes resign. They both go home and have to fight political battles in Parliament, because they became scapegoats for the lack of a quick victory.Interesting. So how else might studying this naval history help us better understand the Revolution?So, the story of the Revolution goes on. Fast forward to Yorktown, where there was an important naval battle, the Battle of the Virginia Capes, on September 5, 1781. Lord Cornwallis was with his army, and he was expecting naval support from New York. He was unaware that there was a big French fleet coming up from the Caribbean. This French fleet came up, and it appeared off of Yorktown, and Cornwallis was flabbergasted. The French had twenty-eight battleships, led by a French admiral named de Grasse. He was not their best. He would never have stood up to Howe. The British fleet, under Admiral Thomas Graves, is delayed, and does not know that de Grasse is there yet. Graves thinks de Grasse only has fourteen battleships. Graves is rushing there with seventeen battleships.

Graves loses this decisive battle of the war, which takes place on September 5. It would’ve been won if Lord Howe had been there, or if Admiral Rodney had been the commander. They were the best admirals that Britain had. Howe was gone, and Rodney did not appear with his fleet at Virginia Capes. Rodney knew he should have been there, but he was sailing home to England. Back in September of 1780, he’d come to New York City with his fleet, and discovered when he arrived that the British army and navy commanders in New York City hated each other. At that time, Benedict Arnold was about to hand over West Point, and Rodney thought the British would control the Hudson and win the war. After Arnold ended up in New York City, he and Rodney remained committed to taking West Point, but General Clinton decides not to pursue West Point, for reasons that are not clear. Rodney and Arnold were furious. Rodney had become so committed to the old Hudson strategy that he thought Clinton, by not attacking West Point, which Rodney and Arnold believed would give them control of the Hudson and win the war, could never be trusted, and he would have nothing more to do with him. Rodney took his fleet and left for the Caribbean. He says he was not interested in fighting alongside Clinton. Rand losing alongside him. In other words, this crazy Hudson strategy undermined British command at a decisive moment.

​... I had so much fun writing this book.Ha, well, that brings us to process and source questions. How did you go about the writing? And when you say naval history gets left out, is that because of the available evidence? Is the source base different?Ships of that era were so different that for historians of the Revolution to get into that whole business would require a huge education, a huge commitment of time, getting to know what exactly was going on and the lay of the land. It would almost be like having to learn Sanskrit.

One of the people who wasn’t in that situation was Samuel Eliot Morison. But he had so many demands on his time that he could never write as much about it as he wanted to. There were just too many people with too many things for him to do. When World War II started, FDR, who had a big interest in the Navy, and who saved the US Navy in the 1930s, called in Morison and said, “You’re going to write the naval history of the war. You’re going to be an admiral, and I’ll give you a staff. Any questions?” Morison asked for only one thing, his approval to be in every theater. He wanted to see the whole thing in order to write it properly. FDR said yes, and Morison was everywhere. He and his staff wrote the long history of the war. He wrote one book on John Paul Jones, but he couldn’t do the naval history of the Revolution. He just never got around to it. There are two Samuel Eliot Morison awards for historians, and I am the only historian who’s won both of them. I just wish the old man could have been around to see it.

Lord & Taylor, Fifth Ave. 39th St., Social Service for Employees, Interior, Classroom. Source: Museum of the City of New York

By Sandra Roff“Mr. Selfridge” and “The Paradise” are two recent PBS series that dramatize working in the new department stores established in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Across the Atlantic, department stores were similarly enjoying success with stores opening and expanding to meet the demands of consumers. However, it was not just the sale of material goods to consumers that took place in these stores, but also activities that seemed to benefit employees. Forward-thinking employers believed they had a responsibility to provide for the welfare of their employees, whether it was for medical care, recreation, or even schooling: a movement known as Industrial Paternalism.

Schooling was an important issue in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the education of immigrants was seen as a crucial means of integrating them into an upwardly-mobile American society. Unfortunately, many children were forced to drop out of school early and seek employment. To try to accommodate these children in the workforce, the New York State Education Department passed an evening school law in 1910 that made it mandatory for boys to attend evening school for six hours per week, for 16 weeks to qualify for an evening school certificate. [1] According to Professor Arthur J. Jones, writing in 1916, there was dissatisfaction with the evening school law of 1910:

It has become increasingly apparent [] that there are distinct limitations to the usefulness of the evening school. The amount of time given is very small compared with that of the day school. The usual time is two hours per evening for four evenings a week and twenty weeks a year, making a total of only one hundred and sixty hours altogether. Add to this the fact that the pupil has practically no time for study, that he is tired and sleepy, and we begin to realize how meagre are these educational opportunities at best.[2]

Even though the law was on the books, students didn’t attend. Social workers, employers and educators supported the young workers and the Wilmot Law was passed in 1913 which allowed local communities to force children between the ages of fourteen and sixteen who had dropped out of school to attend school during the day for four hours a week.[3]Now the time was right for businesses to get involved in the education of their young employees. Those who were fortunate enough to be employed in department stores after 1914 were offered a chance to attend school while working. In 1914 what became known as continuation classes were started with the cooperation of the Board of Education of the City of New York. By 1915 the Journal of the Board of Education of the City of New York reported that all continuation classes organized in department stores, hotels and neighborhood houses be under the jurisdiction of the Committee on Vocational Schools and Industrial Training of the City of New York. Although this seems like a worthy endeavor by the owners of department stores, it wasn’t without controversy. The New York Times reported that the Retail Clerks’ Union protested the opening of these schools. “In this protest the union says that from reports it has at hand it is apparent that the vocational course given in the continuation classes will be a substitute for compulsory night school education.”[4]Even before the Wilmot Law, there were early ventures into the education of workers in department stores. Siegel-Cooper, a massive department store on the corner of 19th street and Sixth Avenue was already participating by offering classes as early as 1896. The New York Times stated: “For them [young girls and boys] the firm will provide a free grammar school, where they will be permitted to spend two hours every day. The textbooks will be furnished free and the girls and boys will receive the same instruction they would get in the public schools.”[5] Another New York City department store, James A. Hearn & Co. also provided an opportunity for cash girls and boys as well as other young employees of the store to attend classes at the store. The New York Times reported that: “The schoolroom was opened on one of the upper floors of the establishment, and all day long children are sent in relays to the classes, where they are taught writing, reading, arithmetic, spelling, history, and general deportment. As an incentive to do good work in the school, advancement in the store is made dependent upon the standing of the candidate in his or her class.”[6]After the passage of the Wilmot Law many more New York City department stores joined the movement and began offering classes. In 1914 Lord & Taylor took the lead and began a school for saleswomen, a different undertaking than the continuation schools, since the curriculum was limited to specific sales skills. Three New York women, Anne Morgan, Mrs. Henry Olliesheimer and Virginia Potter promoted the idea of a school in the store for two years. Potter and Olliesheimer founded the Manhattan Trade School for Girls and Morgan was a member of the vacation committee. They surveyed department stores to determine the requirements for a good saleswoman.[7] Miss Porter said: “While the first school is more or less experimental this is to be no small matter; we are working it out on a big scale, and we expect it to be as firm as a great university, and to spread all over the country.”[8] Classes were held four days a week, from 9:30 to 10:15 and they covered topics such as fashions, color, and a study of the stock.[9] At B. Altman and Co. an academic program conducted by the Board of Education was aimed at girls who had not completed grammar school was started in 1914. Graduation from the program was newsworthy and the New York Times ran the headline, “Altman Girl Win School Diplomas.” “Fifteen attractive young girls were graduated yesterday afternoon from the school which is held daily for the younger employes [sic] of the firm of B. Altman & Co. on the twelfth floor of the annex to the firm’s building, on Fifth Avenue.”[10] The following year Greenhut’s “Big Store” on Sixth Avenue, between 18th and 19th streets graduated nine girls from a continuation class. “The Class is composed of girls who receive instruction in common branches taught in elementary schools, with special relation to business application.”[11]Mr. Greenhut presented each pupil with a pin and urged them to make use of their opportunities. [12] The Altman school graduations continued to make headlines into the 1920s.

B. Altman's (now The Graduate Center) at 34th street and Fifth Avenue, 1915. Source: Museum of the City of New York

Lord & Taylor, Fifth Ave. & 39th St., Group of Girls and Boys (Graduates). Source: Museum of the City of New York

These schools seemed to have had their day by the end of the 1920s and were an experiment which eventually passed into mercantile history. Vocational education took on a new role and these vocational schools took the place of the continuation schools. In 1933, B. Altman and Co. began another experiment — a cooperative graduate course in retailing with the Columbia School of Business.[13] This program probably morphed into the many graduate programs offered in the city as retailing became a highly sought after specialty.

New York City department stores played an impressive role in trying to serve their young employees at a time when attending school was not economically feasible for many boys and girls. These continuation schools provided an opportunity for these students to get a basic education and perhaps even economic mobility. This was an example of the private sector venturing into the public domain in an effort to improve the lives of a small group of New Yorkers. With the demise of many department stores by the later part of the twentieth century, it is important to look back and recognize the role that they played in educating their employees.

Sandra Roff is a Professor and Head of Archives & Special Collections at Baruch College, City University of New York.

For readers who haven't encountered the book yet, how did you come to the topic? As a cultural historian, was there a particular book or film that touched off your inquiry?

The Dying City combines a host of research and personal interests. Its scholarly origins go back to two seminar courses at the University of Minnesota, one on the “urban crisis” and another on cold war culture, taught by Professors Kevin P. Murphy and Elaine Tyler May respectively. I arrived intending to study early twentieth century urban development, but the course material really got me excited about the post-World War II period. May’s Homeward Bound made passing mention of pulp-writer Mickey Spillane as did K.A. Cuordileone’s Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War. Cuordileone’s way of analyzing political tracts, mass-market texts and popular criticism was particularly significant as I turned toward cultural history. As a doctoral student it was probably the most influential monograph I read outside of the postwar metropolitan historiography. Beyond those brief citations, I found that Spillane was understudied and from there I dove into his work.

Coming to a history program from urban planning / studies I carried with me the work of Mike Davis, whose style of writing was something I always aspired to but have yet to replicate. I had a long-time personal interest in prewar pulp fiction and film noir, and clearly those pastimes shine through in a couple of chapters. But like Davis in City of Quartz, if I may summarize and simplify his work, I was interested in the way in which the noir ethos seeps into other parts of the city’s image. Finding the echoes of Spillane, were they to exist, became my primary research project, and, as the final product suggests, they were there.

Outside of the classroom and archive, I have always been drawn to the sensational coverage of crime and violence, both true and in fictional representation. I was also drawn to the idea of New York City as this exceptional place. When I worked for the Parks Department prior to graduate school, I was able to develop a connection with the city as a whole — ​all the boroughs, neighborhoods and communities — that transcended the experience of even lifetime New Yorkers. And as a non-native New Yorker I was very familiar with the dangerous image of the city in the Midwestern consciousness, an image that was not reflected in the reality I found there.

When I left the city, the opportunity to reconnect through research had a certain lure. The challenge, as I suspect readers of the blog will recognize, is finding something new and interesting to say about such a deeply interrogated place. And it’s my hope that The Dying City does that.

What about the rest of your source base? How did you choose the films and novels you focus on? And were there others you considered but left on the cutting room floor?

Related to my previous comment and the time period under study, a discussion of figures like Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs seemed imperative. Of course, they are subjects of a substantial historiography. “Is it possible to offer anything new?” became an anxiety-inducing question. They were active agents in change, but they were also communicators and cultural producers. Analysis of the intent and contingencies of that content appeared to be a gap even in that considerable literature. (However, Robert Caro recently noted that several hundred thousand words of Power Broker material was left on the cutting room floor, so maybe it’s in that pile of papers.)

Examining the broader world of publishing, beyond pulp fantasy, was critical. New York City was and is the home to that side of the culture industry, and magazine journalism was a significant shaper of the zeitgeist at this time. As I began exploring sources related to that realm I was struck by the number of “special” issues devoted to New York City in the late 1950s and early '60s. That’s a clear signal that something was up and that there’s a perceived market for those tales of the ailing city. As I point out in my book, even a serious intellectual outlet like Dissent sought to take advantage of this moment, publishing an issue in 1961 that marked the journal’s largest print run up to that point. The narrative of the city was changing. It wasn’t just pulp fodder anymore, and it didn’t fall easily along political lines, then or now.

I left a lot of material on the cutting room floor. Since this book is as much about the narratives of power and white privilege as it is about the power of narratives, African American and Puerto Rican sources that seek to counter established power structures, including books like Invisible Man, Down these Mean Streets, blaxploitation films and music sources galore, do not receive the kind of analysis they would receive in a broader history of New York City in this period. There’s probably a whole book in Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” alone.

I also made a strategic choice to focus on “homegrown” sources — critics, commentators and texts with a deep connection to New York City — to insure some integrity in the representations. Therefore I resisted simplistic panderings from afar like Hank Williams Jr.’s “Country Boy Will Survive.” Moreover, the pure number of films shot in New York in this period required me to focus on those where the persistent echoes of Necropolis were transparent. I made a choice to leave out the more satiric send-ups, like Escape from New York or Ghostbusters, even though those are some of my personal favorites.

Yes, about those terms, Necropolis and Cosmopolis. You introduce them in your introduction as a way to classify narratives about NYC in the era. How did you settle on these? And is there usefulness in considering the present with this framework?

Cosmopolis and Necropolis are labels that emerge in urban theory, and each have some connection with New York City even if the terminology isn’t well known. The former is perhaps identifiable due to the eponymous Don DeLillo novel and its film adaptation. Cosmopolis also serves as a chapter title for Ric Burns’s New York: A Documentary Film, examining the years 1919-1931 or the post-migration, pre-Depression city emerging as the central cultural force in the world. In planning theory, it constitutes Leonie Sandercock’s idyllic vision of a just, humane, multicultural community. For me the label encapsulates the cosmopolitan vision of New York rearticulated by E.B. White coming out of the depression and world war.

Necropolis, on the other hand, was a term coined by the great Scottish planning theorist, Patrick Geddes, to signify the “city of the dead.” Lewis Mumford, a Geddes disciple, highlighted the “classic danger signals” of Necropolis in The City in History (1962) by citing ancient Rome’s “suffocating” crowds, rising rents, physical decline and violent spectacle. Reading Mumford’s descriptions alongside his scathing review of Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities from the same year, it was pretty clear that he saw New York City as Rome’s heir apparent.

As for New York City today, Cosmopolis reigns, at least on the surface. The city maintains a significant pull on the national and world stage, and I freely admit I felt the allure as well. Crime is down and there’s a subsequent image of safety and universal access, by which I mean there’s nary a neighborhood that hasn’t seen the forces of gentrification or will in the not-too-distant future. However, there is a class dynamic that would have been utterly foreign in the period I write about, with the exception of critics like John Cheever who complained of shrinking safe housing opportunities for upper-middle-class whites in Manhattan.

While many would hail the city of today as a success, I see it more through the lens of what Jacobs called the “self-destruction of diversity” or what writer Jeremiah Moss has termed “hyper-gentrification.” Readers of the blog are likely familiar with Moss’ chronicling of “vanishing New York,” or the people and places driven out by a largely unregulated real estate market during a period of unprecedented economic growth. These chronicles detail the loss of something authentic about New York as well as the decline of that cosmopolitan ethos. This is where the fears about Necropolis reside today, and I find them convincing.

You make a compelling case for cultural history in the book by showing how narratives of New York City's decline could (and did) become self-fulfilling prophesies, even though some of the early examples of this trope — the Spillane novels, in particular — were written at a time when the city was still, in many ways, a thriving Cosmopolis. How powerful were these narratives and imaginaries? There is, of course, a whole literature on the "Origins of the Urban Crisis," in Tom Sugrue's seminal formulation, but how should we teach and understand its cultural dimensions, in New York and other formerly great northern cities?

I would not argue that any source I examine had significant agency on its own or in a vacuum. No one was reading Mickey Spillane for the way he described “shabby blocks” or boarded-up tenements — they read him for the depictions of sex and violence. Although certain works like Death and Life of Great American Cities and Michael Harrington’s The Other America had tremendous influence in their time, particularly in the realm of policy, I am not interested solely in that initial agency. Rather my interests lie in exploring their lasting power, and that requires analysis of the content alongside concurrent voices. A simplified version of the key question: How does the power of discourse snowball? How does the representation become an image that becomes a trope that becomes a signal wielded politically? While the book has a chronological narrative, it is a genealogy of urban fear that requires some reaching backward as well.

I would never suggest that cultural urban history should replace studies of urban political economy, but it’s critical that the two are read alongside one another. For me cultural and intellectual histories are necessary for understanding how power functions and reproduces itself. As such, works by Robert Beauregard, Eric Avila and Steven Conn, among others, have been just as influential in my understanding of the history of twentieth century urban America. The kind of work I do is not going to get you into the offices of political and economic decision-making — Robert Moses did not decide to run the Lower Manhattan Expressway through the Bowery after reading in Mickey Spillane that he’d get little pushback on a “street of people without faces.” But it demonstrates how the “urban crisis” took on enough cultural weight to earn that discursive label, and highlights how fear has been deployed toward certain policy and development ends. If anything, The Dying City illustrates the contingencies and consequences of narratives and imaginaries, which is of patent import in our current political moment.

Related to this question, I'm a social historian of NYC in the 1970s, and in my own work I came across protests by the United Bronx Parents against the film "Fort Apache: The Bronx." Essentially, they argued that the film was a hit job on their neighborhoods, and helped justify neglect of them. Did you find similar protests by New Yorkers who might not have been culture-producers, but who resented or rejected the portrayal of their city as Necropolis?’

What a fascinating find; one emblematic of the perceived power of image and narrative! I suspect that film was more offensive and easier to organize around since it singled out a specific neighborhood or series of Bronx neighborhoods in the title and plot.

I do not write about any specific organized community response to the films I examine, but there is a catalogue of local backlash. Well-known film critics go on the attack, for example. Rex Reed called Midnight Cowboy “perhaps the worst indictment of the city of New York ever captured on film.” Death Wish was condemned by local reviewers as right-wing propaganda produced by tourists.

In several cases the Times and other outlets were compelled to get vox-populi impressions from New Yorkers after viewing certain crisis films. Sometimes these came across in profiles, such as when Peter Boyle expressed concern — even fearing for his own life — recalling the responses he received from locals regarding his portrayal of a hard-hat hippie-hating vigilante in Joe.Death Wish was deemed particularly worthy of comment, and it was illuminating to find the racial and generational divide among New Yorkers’ reactions. Ironically, both Boyle and Charles Bronson, the star of Death Wish, argued in separate Times profiles that audiences near and far misinterpreted the messages of their respective films.

Yes, you point to certain tropes from the Necropolis era — vigilantism, hypermasculinity, law-and-order rhetoric, white-ethnic resentment and racism, the politics of backlash — that feel extremely relevant in Trump's America. Has writing this book helped you make sense of our current moment? Might it help us understand Trump, say, as a product of New York City?

At the risk of insulting the intelligence of a good portion of the population, the cynic in me would say that there’s a hunger for narratives that justify resentment or offer simple-minded remedies to otherwise complicated issues, and there’s people in seats of political, economic and cultural power willing to feed that hunger. I’m not aware of a historical period where that hasn’t been the case. However, there are times when I feel like the processes traced in my book, which required a few decades of cultural evolution, now evolve in real time due to nature of our media landscape. I suppose it’s up to future cultural historians to do a proper assessment of that hypothesis.

Donald Trump and the movement he has inspired hovers over the whole book, even though the real estate mogul isn’t acknowledged by name and most of the research and writing predates his political rise. The rhetoric on cities Trump employed first on the campaign trail and now in office suggests that he lives in a Necropolis of the mind. It’s the image of crime and disorder familiar from the 1970s, a period when he was on the rise and actively discriminating against African American New Yorkers. The lasting power of that image, to me, is quite astonishing given his mostly uninterrupted lifetime tenure as a New Yorker. When was the last time he actually set foot on a sidewalk in the city? Has he ventured out of Midtown in the last thirty years other than to limo off to New Jersey or La Guardia? The extent of his experiential urban knowledge consists of a very isolated vertical bubble centered on Trump Tower, and has for some time. He helped build this Xanadu of a city, and he can’t find meaning in it, much less enjoy it. What a sad, tragic New York figure.

As a closing question, who do you hope is reading this book, and what you want them to take away from it? You've worked for the city and studied planning as well as history. Are there narratives or analytic ways of thinkingthat you hope planners and policymakers (as well as culture-producers) might focus on as they shape the city of the future?

Well, first I hope Donald Trump reads it, although the fact that someone has written a history of postwar New York City without a single mention of his name or brand would surely set him off. Still, I have no doubt that if he sat down and went through it cover-to-cover it would prove transformative for his sense of self-awareness.

Seriously though, and at the risk of conceit, I think The Dying City has a lot of offer historians, Americanists, geographers, urbanists and planners. But I also hope that fans of popular, New York and media history pick it up as well. I consciously tried to write it in way that would appeal to a non-academic audience. I cannot say for certain that it will. but I can attest that family members and friends outside of academia have read it. If someone is at the Strand or online looking at recent New York histories like Kim Phillips-Fein’s Fear City or Samuel Zipp’s Manhattan Projects, I contend that my book makes a fine companion narrative to those great stories.

We live in a time seemingly defined by heightened attention to language and discourse; the way we communicate and the words we use have considerable power and consequence, and perhaps that’s where The Dying City is most pertinent. The realms of planning and economic development could benefit from greater awareness to the power of narratives. Six years ago I moved from New York City to a small town in northern Wisconsin that, despite favorable sustainable development indicators, often finds itself taken advantage of due to persistent narratives of rural death and decline. It’s a bit ironic and meta then to find myself an active participant on the frontlines of a cultural struggle that echoes the landscape covered in my book. I hope this research has prepared me well.

Brian L. Tochterman is Assistant Professor of Sustainable Community Development at Northland College. You can read more about his book here, here, and here.

Today on Gotham, editor Katie Uva interviews Jackie Dinas, a docent at the Merchant's House Museum, about the process of researching Irish immigration and interpreting the lives of Irish servants in New York.

Exterior of the Merchant's House.

What is the Merchant's House Museum?

The Merchant’s House Museum is a historic house museum dedicated to the early 19th century domestic life of a wealthy merchant family and their servants in New York City. It is one of the finest surviving examples of the architecture of this period in the city and it is unique among house museums because the museum’s collection of over 3,000 items belonged to the Tredwell family, who lived there for almost 100 years. Most of it has never left the house!

How did the idea for an Irish servants tour come to be?

There had always been an interest among visitors in the servants but for a long time the servants’ quarters had been closed to visitors. So when the museum decided to reopen that space, it seemed like a perfect time to create a tour that would highlight what life was like living and working in the Tredwell home. So the museum staff and volunteers came together to try and create a tour that would speak both to the daily life of the servants but also to the greater role that Irish immigrants played in the development of New York City. We are mostly telling the story of Irish immigration from the 1830s-50s from the perspective of young women.

Why were so many Irish women servants? What other things were they likely to do in New York?

There are a lot of complex reasons why Irish women were in demand as servants as well as why they wanted jobs as live-in servants; we have a whole tour surrounding these reasons! The primary motivator for these women was money. They were new immigrants to America, most often coming from rural poverty, and so the average wages provided by a service job could be an enormous amount of money for them. That is in addition to having room and board included at a time when safe living conditions and quality of food were not a guarantee in New York City. They used this money to provide not only for themselves but often for their entire families, both here in America and back home in Ireland. Wages provided from a service job could often make a young woman the breadwinner for her entire family.

Opportunities for working women outside of service at this time were scarce. There was seamstress work, laundry work, factory work — ​all of which would have been much lower paid than service work and would not have included room and board or much job mobility.

Was being a servant something Irish women typically did as a starting point before moving on to something else, or did a lot of Irish women work as servants for their whole lives?

This is something that has been contested among historians. Certainly a common misconception about the culture of servants in America is that they were devoted lifelong servants such as people see on tv shows like Downton Abbey. That simply was not the case in New York. Service was mostly a means to an end for these women, not a lifelong career. We do know from historical records that there was a lot of job mobility; even women who did stay in service their whole lives did not stay with one family for significant periods of time.

Many women stayed in service just long enough to save enough money to get married. Marriage was the most common reason women left service since you could not be married and be a live-in servant. But many women saved money to try and advance their own status in society and as the 19th century progressed you saw many women going from service to careers as teachers, nurses, shop girls, and newly created nonprofit jobs.

Living and working in the houses of wealthy New Yorkers did allow servants who left the profession to bring with them an understanding of an upper class lifestyle and often modeled their own home lives after what they saw in the houses they once worked in.

What kinds of challenges did Irish servants face in New York?

Well, that last question was a good segue to this one! As the 19th century progressed and industrialization allowed for mass production, there was a lot of class tension between servants and their employers over consumer goods. Servants wanted to emulate an upper class lifestyle by wearing similar fashion styles or buying similar home goods and many employers felt this was preventing servants from “knowing their place” and was one of the reasons uniforms began to be implemented later in the 19th century for servants.

But easily the biggest challenge Irish servants faced in New York was prejudice. Prejudice against the Irish in this period has been well documented in all factors of life; many people particularly associate that with the difficulty men had finding work and have seen images of “Irish Need Not Apply” signs in books or museums. Negative stereotypes of the Irish were easily found in magazines and newspapers of the day and those negative connotations certainly would have affected the lives of servants as well.

For Irish women, particularly those working in the houses of wealthy Protestant employers, much of the prejudice they faced focused on their Catholicism. There was a strong fear that these young women living in your home and taking care of your children would somehow indoctrinate them with their Catholic ways! There were plenty of magazine articles warning women about how to prevent your children from becoming secret papists.

Servants' quarters at the Merchant's House.

Did most Irish immigrants speak English? Do we know how many Irish immigrants could read and write?This is also something that historians seem to disagree on, or at least it isn’t clear enough to make a generalized statement. Irish was the predominant language in Ireland until the 19th century. With the introduction of the National School system in the 1830s and the forced education of English in Ireland throughout the 19th century that changed dramatically and English became the dominant language.At the Merchant’s House we are mostly telling the story of young women who immigrated to America in the 1830s-50s at which point there was definitely a case to be made for mixed language. However, we also know from historical documents that servants who spoke English were in high demand, and Irish women were counted among that group, so I think it’s safe to say some did, and some didn’t.As for reading and writing, it’s a similar story. We know that at this time there was formalized education in Ireland that provided these skills for children, but considering most schools were far from the rural communities where most of these women came from and children would be expected to work in the home or on farms, you would probably get a mixed bag here as well.We do know that cooks, who were often the most senior servants, would usually be expected to be able to read and write in order to keep track of deliveries, house inventory, menu planning, things like that.Was there a particular part of Ireland that most Irish immigrants came from? Are there ways that the region they came from in Ireland affected what jobs they worked or where they lived in the city?During the time period we focus on at the Merchant’s House we are looking at most immigration stemming from the potato famine that devastated Ireland in the 19th century. The origins of this are too complex to really get into here but the famine sparked mass immigration to America, particularly from communities hit the hardest, which were often poor and rural, many in the Western counties of Ireland. Immigration to America and New York had already begun before the famine; so many people immigrating already had friends, family, or neighbors that connected them to New York. These connections were the biggest drivers of where people lived in the city or what jobs they got. Often people lived in New York with people from their home counties back in Ireland, and word of mouth was an extremely common way that service jobs were acquired.But one of the most important parts of the story of young Irish servant women is that they were responsible for a lot of the chain migration we think of in this period. Their employment and wages paid for thousands of their friends and family to come to America, to find housing and jobs, and even if they were unaware of it, they were reshaping New York City as a result.Were there particular ways Irish servants brought their own customs into the households they worked in?Definitely! Cultural exchange was a big part of service. Not only were the servants learning from their employers as mentioned above, but their employers were learning from their servants as well. Music was one of the big ways that this cultural exchange manifested. Irish songs and ballads became popular throughout the city and one of the Tredwell daughters could easily be playing a song on the piano in the parlor that one of their servants might have been singing on the stairs. Of course, there was this festering prejudice as mentioned, but there was a strong sense of pride in being Irish and being Catholic, and servants specifically clung to these customs being in not only a foreign country but in a home where all the customs would have been foreign to them. As a result, employers would have been exposed to many different pieces of Irish culture and as they say, exposure is the antidote to prejudice.How did the Irish celebrate St. Patrick's Day in the 19th century?St. Patrick’s Day is a perfect example of a custom that was really adopted by the Irish community in America as a way of expressing cultural pride at a time when they were often looked down upon for their heritage. In 19th century New York the St. Patrick’s Day parade was a massive full day experience. Many servants would have been given (or demanded) the day off to attend the parade as well as the parties and church gatherings that went along with it.Another important custom, particularly for servants who were alone in America or far from home, would be writing home asking their families to send some dirt or shamrocks back from Ireland, to have a piece of their home with them to celebrate on St. Patrick’s Day.

What sources were particularly valuable as you assembled this story? What should a person read if they want to find out more about the Irish in New York?We did use what we know about the servants who worked in the Merchant’s House specifically as a starting point for the tour. We don’t have too much information but census reports give us a good idea of the basics. Then we used primary sources of the day like letters and diaries as well as ladies home journals to understand what the work would have been like but most importantly we used the work of some wonderful historians to build in the cultural context. For general reading about Irish women in this time and particularly servants, I would recommend the following:Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century by Hasia DinerThe Irish Bridget by Margaret Lynch-BrennanServing Women: Household Service in 19th Century America by Faye DuddenFor a comprehensive look at Irish immigration I would recommend the anthology:Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States by J.J. Lee and Marion CaseyAnd for a history of the Merchant’s House, I would recommend:The Old Merchant’s House by Mary KnappOf course to learn more, you can join us on any of our Irish Tours! The upcoming St. Patrick’s Day celebrations will feature tours the whole week leading up to St. Patrick’s Day at 2 pm on Monday 3/12, Thursday 3/15 (including a 6:30pm tour) & Friday 3/16 and then on St. Patrick's Day (Saturday) tours at 12:30, 2:00, and 3:30 pm. A full listing of events can be found on our website.

The Anti-Slavery Almanac of 1839 describes the kidnapping of a free-born man.

By David Fiske

The Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave shocked audiences a few years ago — not just with its depiction of the cruelty often endured by slaves — but also because of its acknowledgement of a tragic historical reality: that in those days a free-born African American could be kidnapped and enslaved. Sadly, the story told by the film — ​of Solomon Northup’s kidnapping and subsequent servitude — was not a story that was unique. Before the Civil War, kidnapping was conducted with a certain degree of regularity.

Northup was kidnapped from a community in upstate New York — as were several other black citizens — but because there was a more substantial population of free blacks in New York City, the metropolis was the locale for a number of similar kidnappings.In the city, law enforcement officers investigated a number of such crimes. In at least two cases, policemen from New York went undercover to apprehend criminals who attempted to lure African Americans out of the city and into a life of servitude. In these two cases, police were able to save the victims from a horrible fate.

David Ruggles (1810-1849), an abolitionist and journalist, who often raised awareness of free black New Yorkers' vulnerability to kidnapping.

Kidnappers knew that physical abductions could be messy. Any resistance offered by victims might draw the attention of bystanders, or even police. Instead, as with Northup, they commonly lured their victims away from the safety of home with promises of employment elsewhere.In November 1819, Mary Underhill met a man named Joseph Pulford, who said he could get her a good-paying position if she were willing to relocate. Underhill, who was a servant in a home on Franklin Street in New York, said she would be interested, and Pulford told her to “keep dark and say nothing.” He said she should pack her things and meet him in a few days, after he’d made arrangements for her departure.Actually, Pulford intended to sell her to a Captain Glasshune, the master of a ship bound for Havana. Having been approached by Pulford, Glasshune pretended to be interested in such a transaction. However, he instead told a man named Henry J. Hassey, who in turn alerted a constable named John C. Gillen. Gillen hatched a plan to catch Pulford.Ms. Underhill showed up — per Pulford’s instructions — and he had her wait near the docks until he could find Captain Glasshune. When he met up with Glasshune, the captain was with another man named Johnson (who was actually Constable Gillen). Johnson claimed to be from Havana and was interested in obtaining two more black people to the 40 he said he already had on the ship. Pulford offered to sell Underhill, whom he said was waiting nearby, for $50. Johnson asked to see her first, not wanting to, as he said, buy “a pig in the poke.” After a short argument, Pulford led the way to where his victim was waiting. When asked to give a receipt for the $50 he was getting, Pulford protested, at which point “Johnson” revealed his true identity and told Pulford: “You must go along with me.” Pulford at first thought it was a joke, but was soon taken, along with Underhill, to the police station.

​At a trial in December 1819, in which Mayor Cadwallader D. Colden presided, Underfill provided testimony that Colden called “unimpeachable.” Her story was backed up by Hassey and Gillen, who appeared as witnesses. Pulford argued that he had not forcibly seized the woman, nor taken her against her will. But New York State law included “inveigling” in its law against kidnapping. Inveigling, or tricking someone, still constituted an offense. As Colden informed the jury: “To constitute kidnapping or inveigling, no force is necessary.” Colden, who had antislavery leanings himself, dutifully told the jury that they must not allow their personal feelings on the matter to influence their deliberation. The jury quickly returned a guilty verdict, and Colden at once sentenced Pulford to the maximum allowed sentence: fourteen years in state prison. He regretted, he told the defendant, that he could not impose a death penalty.

The Colored American's coverage of the Pulford trial, 1819

In another case, years later, Sarah Taylor (who was also known as Sarah Harrison) resided with her mother on Grand Street in New York. In March 1858, a man by the name of James P. Finley convinced the teenager’s mother to let him take her over to Newark, New Jersey, where he knew of someone who was in need of a servant girl. Finley took her out of the city on a train, but instead of getting off at Newark, they continued on to Washington, D. C. There, Finley and a female acquaintance made attempts to sell the young girl to a slave trader. Ms. Taylor, however, figured out what was going on, and “made so much trouble about it” that her two kidnappers decided to scram, and went to Maryland.

Taylor was left at Willard’s hotel in Washington, and the proprietor sent a wire to Daniel F. Tiemann, the mayor of New York. Tiemann verified the girl’s story with her mother, and requested that Willard keep her at his hotel until some city policemen could get there. Not long afterward, Officers Barry and Lusk arrived and determined that the kidnappers were staying in Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland. There, Barry borrowed a postman’s uniform and pretended to be a postal clerk. When Finley came to collect his mail, Barry trailed him to a hotel, where he also found the female accomplice. The couple were taken into custody and returned to New York. Sarah Taylor was soon reunited with her family there.During the prosecution of the perpetrators, two well-known antislavery activists were present: Lewis Tappan and Dr. James McCune Smith (the latter paid the bond that was required to insure that Taylor would appear as a witness at the trial). City Recorder George G. Barnard presided at the trial that spring. Finley was found guilty and sentenced to only two years in prison. He did not serve even that minimal sentence, however, as Governor Edwin D. Morgan pardoned him in January 1859, with the requirement that he return to his native Canada. The fate of the woman who assisted Finley is uncertain.

David Fiske is a librarian and researcher. He is the author of Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave and Solomon Northup's Kindred: The Kidnapping of Free Citizens before the Civil War.

​Further reading:

The attempted kidnapping of Mary Underhill is described in “Joseph Pulford’s Case,” New-York City-Hall Recorder, for the Year 1819 (Daniel Rogers, compiler), pp. 172-174.

Sarah Taylor's kidnapping was reported in various newspapers in New York City and Washington, D. C. in the spring of 1858. A reasonably detailed account appeared in the New York Times on March 25, 1858.

One never knows where a family heirloom will lead. Brooklyn’s Renaissancebegan with a cultural artifact that Italian Renaissance scholar Melissa Meriam Bullard’s mother inherited from a distant cousin: a portrait of Luther Boynton Wyman (1804-79), a forgotten shipping merchant for Liverpool’s Black Ball Line, long-time resident of Brooklyn Heights, and “guiding hand” in the founding of the “arts-friendly community” along Montague Street during the 1850s and 1860s (with the Academy of Music, now “BAM,” as Brooklyn’s cultural center).​​Bullard argues that Wyman and other members of Brooklyn’s business elite, inspired by William Roscoe, the "Lorenzo de' Medici of Liverpool," exemplify the ways in which “Atlantic commercial networks [facilitated] collaborative patronage of culture, and civic pride [that] flowed together around the arts.” She suggests that noblesse oblige as much as competition with Manhattan motivated Brooklyn’s “haut-bourgeois families” to employ their private wealth to sustain the arts as Brooklyn emerged as the third-largest independent city in the United States. Rather than proposing the creation of public institutions, Brooklyn’s elite employed the Medici merchant patronage model to found the city’s first reading rooms and musical, artistic, and horticultural societies to “serve as uplifting examples to their grubby and untutored urban neighbors.” Unfortunately, the Civil War disrupted Brooklyn’s Renaissance; and early success could not withstand the changes and divisions that the Gilded Age engendered. As a result, Brooklyn’s rapid but short-lived cultural renaissance remained lost to history — until Bullard followed Luther Wyman’s trail from rural Massachusetts to Brooklyn.

Divided into 10 chapters, and based upon Bullard’s expertise in the Medici family’s influence on 15th-century Florence, as well as research into London’s Baring Archive, Liverpool’s Public Records Office, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and especially Brooklyn- and New York City-based archival holdings and newspapers (where she searched for traces of Luther Wyman’s life), Brooklyn’s Renaissance will appeal to music and art historians as well as a general audience interested in the mid-nineteenth-century genesis of some of Brooklyn’s most iconic institutions, including BAM, the Brooklyn Arts Association, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Although the book’s sub-title suggests a much larger cultural and commercial history of the Atlantic World, Brooklyn’s Renaissance is largely a biography of Luther Wyman, a talented singer and cello player who became the musical director of Brooklyn’s First Unitarian Congregational Society, president of both the Brooklyn Sacred Music Society and Brooklyn Philharmonic Society, and “cultural entrepreneur” involved in the founding of BAM to house the Philharmonic and serve as a cultural venue to highlight the accomplishments of the wealthy, raise money for philanthropic purposes, commemorate cultural society anniversaries, and bring the public together in common cause, particularly during the Civil War. But Bullard also employs Wyman’s forty-year career (1834-75) with the Black Ball Line packet ships to trace the social-capital networks that allowed Wyman to ascend in Brooklyn, where he and other parvenus mingled with wealthier neighbors in Brooklyn Heights, including those he met through his affiliation with the Unitarian Church and membership in the exclusive Brooklyn Club over which Henry E. Pierrepont presided. Bullard additionally traces Wyman’s participation in the founding of Brooklyn’s Mercantile Library, the site selection of Prospect Park, the organization of the Soldiers’ Home Association that provided relief to sick and disabled Civil War soldiers, and the success of the 1864 Brooklyn and Long Island Sanitary Fair that raised funds for the Union cause. She has, moreover, bequeathed to future researchers a useful appendix containing Brooklyn’s principal patrons of the arts during the mid-nineteenth century, most of whom had New England roots, familial-religious connections, mercantile backgrounds, residences in Brooklyn Heights, and ownership in businesses in Lower Manhattan and along Brooklyn’s waterfront when riverboats, commuter ferries, and sailing vessels connected the two cities to each other and the wider Atlantic World.

Chapters 2 through 4 provide the contexts for Wyman’s career in Brooklyn, including the “parallel renaissances” taking place in urban enclaves throughout the Atlantic World. According to Bullard, the Medici family’s influence on Florence provided the private patronage model that others in England and then the United States would follow, beginning in Liverpool, the center of the Atlantic World’s cotton exchange. There, William Roscoe (1753-1831) invested his wealth in the fine arts and educational endeavors as “part of a larger civic enterprise” that made Liverpool the first “'modern’ renaissance to blossom in the Atlantic World.” Bullard focuses on Roscoe’s role as Medici biographer, Unitarian dissenter, abolitionist, supporter of the American Revolution, collector of books and paintings, and founding member of Liverpool’s Athenaeum, Lyceum, Botanic Gardens, and other institutions that provided the stimuli for the “associational culture” that developed in American seaports.

Wyman’s life-long association with sacred music and the Unitarian Church, as well as his employment in shipping, also helps to frame the book. Moving from rural Massachusetts to Boston during 1824 (at the age of 20), Wyman joined an older brother who had already established himself as a music professor and member of Harvard’s cultural elite. Once in Boston, Wyman gained employment as a clerk and received an education in the synergies between business and cultural networks, meeting people who had solidified overlapping business and religious networks through marriage, employment, and cultural institutions. As Boston’s shipping dominance began to wane during the late 1820s, Wyman then followed the Erie Canal to Troy, New York, where he opened a music school, bathing house, and strolling garden. By 1831, he had also joined the Troy Towboat Company, a shipping operation connecting the Erie and Champlain Canals to the Port of New York. Transferring to Manhattan in 1833, to run the line’s New York office, Wyman quickly switched from the management of riverboat shipping to the trans-Atlantic cotton trade. During 1834, he joined the Black Ball Line, where he ascended to merchant shipper, and eventually part owner. With Baring Brothers and Company investing in American expansion and the Black Ball Line through its Liverpool branch, Wyman thus entered a world of personal, commercial, theological, and intellectual networks linked to the risky business of the global cotton economy.

During the 1840s, despite competition and risk, and as Manhattan’s cultural institutions moved uptown, Brooklyn’s business elite, already “well networked and secure in their professional standing, found it relatively easy to collaborate with one another in cultural enterprises” centered on a rapidly expanding Brooklyn. In a flurry of activity, Brooklyn’s “haut bourgeois” thus plowed their business profits into cultural institutions, with sacred music (and Wyman as president of the Brooklyn Sacred Music Society), as well as educational and philanthropic impulses catalyzing a rapid albeit late-comer Renaissance in Brooklyn (pages 108 and 126 list the major cultural initiatives they undertook between 1848 and 1864).

Chapter 5, “Symphony of the Arts,” anchors the book, providing rich details about how Brooklyn elites collaborated to build the Brooklyn Academy of Music (“the jewel in the Crown of the Brooklyn Renaissance”), Horticultural Society, Athenaeum, and other cultural institutions centered on Brooklyn Heights. Indeed, one of Bullard’s major themes is the ways in which Brooklyn’s elite used their private wealth rather than encouraging taxation to support the arts. She also makes distinctions between artist- and business-run organizations. For example, whereas musicians founded and ran New York’s Philharmonic as an employee cooperative, Wyman organized an association of business elites to direct Brooklyn’s Philharmonic Society and its benefit concerts for Brooklyn’s Horticultural Society and various charitable causes. The success of the Philharmonic’s corporate model, complete with expectations of a sizeable return on investment, then guided the building of the BAM (founded in 1857, incorporated by the State in 1859, and completed in 1861 as the country’s first multi-purpose performing arts center). That, Bullard argues, launched larger efforts to create tax-funded parks that could compete with Manhattan’s Central Park. Brooklyn’s wealthy businessmen dominated the BAM’s board, authorized stock subscriptions, and promised a debt-free opening. Alas, cost overruns and the Panic of 1857 forced Brooklyn’s elite to raise more money to finish the project. As a result, elite women embarked upon a fund-raising project, selling it on civic pride and promises of future profits. Ultimately, their efforts not only allowed BAM to open on 21 January 1861, but also widened the circle of subscription holders to other social strata, which quickly paved the way for performances and space uses the elite abhorred, particularly what they considered bawdier theatrical productions.

With the “visionary” phase complete during the 1850s, Bullard’s Chapters 6 and 7 then turn to institutionalization and the building of a larger arts district centered on Montague Street, including the Brooklyn Arts Association (incorporated in 1864), and Brooklyn and Long Island Historical Society (built on Pierrepont Street in 1881). That process began with the BAM, but Bullard argues that the Civil War “diverted” Brooklyn’s Renaissance in ways that “loosened the parameters of polite culture formerly set by Brooklyn’s elite,” fractured Brooklyn’s wealthy patrons, and made political topics more conspicuous. One of the strengths of these chapters is Bullard’s description of the 1864 Brooklyn and Long Island Sanitary Fair, and the prominent role that elite women played in its success. Inspired by London’s Crystal Palace (1851), and with BAM the central venue, the Fair paved the way for the exhibition of art collections (particularly portraits of Wyman and other Brooklyn elites), plants, and especially the technological innovations, war souvenirs Wyman and others collected, and historical oddities that drew a mass audience from Brooklyn, Manhattan, New Jersey, and elsewhere. According to Bullard, the Sanitary Fair also foreshadowed the rise of Coney Island and other low-brow cultural venues throughout Brooklyn. Increasingly, broader subscriptions also led to contentious debates over the privileges Brooklyn’s elite possessed as BAM directors, including private entrances, privileged seating, and special keys to luxury boxes. Those debates also coalesced with increasing corruption and profiteering charges against the Brooklyn business magnates who had increased their wealth and influence on Civil War government contracts.

Bullard devotes the final three chapters of the book to the post-Civil War era through New York City’s consolidation in 1898, a period tainted by “a weakening of Brooklyn’s proud civic spirit as the trust-based culture of the old commercial elite shrank into the great self-absorption characteristic of the Gilded Age.” With Brooklyn’s population swelling on new immigration, the Brooklyn Bridge under construction, and some of Brooklyn’s most prominent elite (including Wyman) swept up in scandal, financial embarrassments, social unrest, and even death, several cultural institutions failed, including the Philharmonic and Horticultural societies. And, by the time he died in 1879, Wyman no longer lived in Brooklyn Heights; reduced circumstances had forced him to the periphery. He, along with Brooklyn’s Renaissance, slipped into obscurity until Bullard rediscovered both. In addition, the elite of Brooklyn Heights increasingly walled themselves off, preferring private, exclusive events and clubs over public ones, and consolidation over an independent Brooklyn, Bullard argues. When a fire destroyed the BAM and its archives in 1903 as well, banks and insurance companies replaced the cultural institutions that had dominated Montague Street. Thereafter, Brooklyn’s cultural institutions found a home under a municipal framework rather than through merchant patronage.

Although Chapters 5-7 provide a fascinating cultural history of Brooklyn during the 1850s and 1860s, those interested in Brooklyn’s place within a larger history of capitalism will find the framing and concluding chapters disappointing. Indeed, no historian writing about Brooklyn during the twenty-first century can afford to ignore Craig Steven Wilder’s powerful Covenant with Color(2000), but Bullard does. Instead, most of her Brooklyn-based narrative relies on the free-soil newspaper, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, as well as Henry Stiles’ history of Brooklyn (published between 1867 and 1870). In the latter’s three volumes, she ultimately finds little mention of Wyman, perhaps because he died in reduced circumstances and under the aegis of the financial scandals that Stiles did not deem worthy of his hagiographical account. Had she consulted Wilder, Bullard would have learned that most of Brooklyn’s elite amassed their wealth on slave labor until New York State abolished the system in 1827. Thereafter, merchants working the docks of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn’s waterfront expanded their wealth and political influence on the cotton economy that linked Brooklyn to Southern slavery and Liverpool’s famous Cotton Exchange.[1]

Indeed, Brooklyn’s merchant elite followed more than a patronage model: by following Roscoe and the Baring Brothers into Liverpool’s Cotton Exchange, they engaged in dangerous speculation and toxic debt securitized by Southern property in land and slaves. That speculation helps to explain Roscoe’s connections to the 1820 bank failure that nearly resulted in his arrest and prompted the liquidation of his assets (including his art collection), Baring’s contribution to the global economy’s instability and Panic of 1837, and the dwindling profits of cotton that played no small part in the Financial Panic of 1857. As a result, Bullard only mentions, then drops rather than interrogates both the topic of slavery as well as the speculative bubbles that led to business failure, wealth destruction and the collapse of Brooklyn’s privately organized cultural institutions. These slights matter, for most American historians have now reached the consensus that the Civil War lifted the north out of its economic woes, on the very government contracts and subsidies that allowed Brooklyn’s elite to complete their renaissance, speculate in railroads and continental expansion (that ultimately led to the Panic of 1873, Great Depression of 1893-7, and consolidation of Greater New York City), and build monuments to themselves rather than “uplift” those below them. Moreover, in her conclusion, Bullard is forced to concede that Brooklyn’s Renaissance “dealt more sparingly with connections to the larger Atlantic World in which Brooklyn remained deeply imbedded.” As a result, she forewent the opportunity to explore Wyman as member in the vanguard rather than as victim of the Gilded Age. That progressive politicians ultimately subsumed Brooklyn’s cultural institutions under a municipal framework reflects their understanding of the limits of private charity, that politicians have an obligation to protect public institutions from the ravages of the market economy and corporate corruption. At the current moment, that lesson is well worth remembering.[2]

Beyond Brooklyn’s commercial connections to the larger Atlantic World, and despite the recognition that social-capital networks mattered to the role that Wyman eventually played in Brooklyn’s cultural history, Bullard’s narrative gets ensnared in the myth of the “self-made” capitalist. As Pamela Walker Laird’s Pull exposes, there are no self-made Americans. Religious affiliations, ethnic identity, and familial connections matter to our understanding of who succeeds and who fails, who gets pulled into networks and who gets shunned. This does not negate Wyman’s contribution to Brooklyn’s Renaissance. Instead, it serves as another reminder: that he followed an already established brother to Boston, and made religious and New England connections in Troy and Brooklyn that allowed him to enjoy a long career with the Black Ball Line as well as cultural standing among Brooklyn’s elite even if he never amassed the sorts of wealth and privilege that many of his Brooklyn neighbors, including Henry Stiles, had inherited.[3]

These shortcomings aside, Bullard’s book — especially her chapters on the evolution of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Sanitary Fair — make an important contribution to Brooklyn’s history during the middle years of the 19th century.

​Jocelyn Willis is a Professor of History at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

[1] Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (Columbia University Press, 2000), 1-41.

I usually start by asking how authors came to their topic, but in your case the connection is very clear. So, to phrase the question in a different way, what were your goals for this project? Who do you hope is reading the book, and what do you hope they take away from it?

In the latter part of my ten years as chancellor of Rutgers-Newark, I began thinking casually about returning to research when I left administration. I knew that most former chancellors or presidents rarely undertake scholarship after leaving administration, but I wanted to be different. I had written about universities and cities since my days as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago. I had taught urban studies for thirteen years at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), which proclaimed itself the nation’s first urban land-grant college. At UDC I directed an NEH-founded program to provide historical research on public education and housing in Washington to be used by policy makers, and presented the research to the mayor and other city officials. I then taught and held administrative positions at George Mason University, an institution deeply committed at that time to serving as an anchor for the rapidly expanding suburban community of northern Virginia. In 1998, I came to Rutgers University-Newark as arts & sciences dean with the goal of taking fullest advantage in teaching, research and service of its location in what was then considered one of the most troubled cities in America. And I served as president of the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. So I thought that when I did return to scholarship I would write something on the history of urban universities.

A longtime friend and leading historian of American higher education, the late NYU professor Harold Wechsler, suggested that I begin by looking at the annual meetings and publications of the Association of Urban Universities (AUU), founded in 1914. I was surprised to learn how the leaders of universities in cities articulated profoundly negative views about the impact of urban life on college students. This was quite different from my research on the early years of the University of Chicago, where the founding presidentWilliam Rainey Harper embraced the city as a rich resource to build a new entity, the American research university. My work on the AUU led me to focus my research on how higher education and civic leaders viewed urban higher education.

Well, that brings me to a process question (we like to ask these). You've been studying the history of higher education since your first book, A City and Its Universities (1989).How has the field evolved?

When I researched the ways universities engaged with public policy issues in Progressive era Chicago, almost nothing had been written specifically about the history of city-university relationships. The issue received modest attention in historical writing on the emergence of academic disciplines and research universities. Since publication of my book on Chicago in 1980, much has been written on the history of higher education. But historians did not publish very much about the development of urban colleges and their relationship to cities until about fifteen years ago. Among these more recent histories are Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (2005), John Lewis Recchuiti, Civic Engagement: Social Science and Progressive Era Reform in New York City 2007) and Sharon Harr, The City as Campus: Urban Higher Education in Chicago (2011). A number of institutional histories published in recent years also examine the relationship with the city, and scholars have written a lot about university relationships with their neighborhoods and their role in gentrification.

And tell us about the source base for the book, particularly for our New York City readership. What kind of records are available in the metro region to historians of higher ed?

Since academicians write a lot, I have looked at numerous articles by administrators and professors about the city and in particular about issues like open enrollment in New York. The records of higher education organizations are extremely useful. Although the book is not based on case studies of specific institutions, I found the archives of City College, Hunter College, Columbia and UCLA very useful. The Rockefeller Archives Center in Tarrytown houses the records of the Ford Foundation. Columbia University has the records of the Carnegie Corporation. The Hoover Institution archives in Palo Alto contain the records of national higher education organizations, including the American Council on Education and Association of Urban Universities.

Okay, moving on to content. In the introduction you write about the evolving meaning of the term "urban university," and offer a capacious definition— one that includes elite institutions aspiring to global influence which happen to be located in cities, as well as public institutions built expressly to serve the people of these cities. Columbia is an example of the first, with a particularly fraught history of conflict with its surrounding neighborhood. Gotham is based at CUNY, the largest example of the second sort. These are very different kinds of institutions, but you still find it valuable to study them together. What kinds of things unite them, beyond location? What can they learn from one another? And what do we gain from this approach?

Given my book on Chicago, I was stunned to learn about the widely held view that urban universities were defined by a student body made up largely of local students from low or modest income families. Discovering the low status if not pejorative view of the term “urban university” made it all the more important for me to study the range of institutions in cities. Irrespective of their students’ socio-economic backgrounds, cities provide enormous resources for teaching, faculty and student research and community engagement. Colleges in cities can learn from each other about ways to use the city most effectively for teaching in a wide variety of disciplines. They can also share with each other the opportunities, rewards and perils of undertaking research on local public policy issues.

However, there is a striking difference between residential and commuter institutions. The opportunities for resident students to engage with the city are much greater, and commuter colleges normally do not have the same impact on their immediate neighborhoods as schools with large numbers of students living on campus or nearby. Many urban commuter institutions are now building residence halls to enable lower-income students to get the 24/7 college experience. At Rutgers University-Newark, there was significant opposition by the central administration in New Brunswick to student housing. Some argued that no one would want to live in a city plagued with violence, crime and poverty. But campus housing has been very successful and is growing. And I secured a large corporate donation to enable low-income Newark residents to live on campus. This program has been spectacularly successful and greatly expanded by my successor.

That sets me up for my next question. As you note toward the end of the book, the "urban crisis" narrative has undergone a remarkable reversal in the past decade or so. I actually have a trio of questions here. First, what role have universities played in the “urban renaissance”?

There are a many reasons for the dramatic revitalization of some American cities. “Eds and meds” certainly play a role, and increasingly higher education institutions see themselves as anchor institutions which help attract businesses that benefit from the expertise of faculty in the sciences, technology, the performing and visual arts, economics and many other disciplines. In Newark, the growing number of students living on or near campus has spurred significant retail, commercial and residential development on long vacant property. In many places, however, the university has played a role, sometimes intentional and sometimes not, in stimulating construction of new upper middle-class housing on property occupied by low-income neighborhood residents. Universities today should work with city government and with developers to insure that a significant portion of new neighborhood housing is reserved for low-income residents, especially those whose neighborhood residences are eliminated.

Second, how does this changing narrative affect the larger world of higher education? As you note, higher education had a deep rural bias in the 19th century, which continued well into the twentieth (reinforced, perhaps, by the rise of a persistent "urban crisis"). Today, however, most college students are in cities, and many rural colleges are struggling. What does this mean for the future of higher education?

As universities increasingly incorporate city life into the college experience, college education is now focused substantially on experiential learning and on inculcating the social value of civic engagement. With overall higher education enrollments declining and the popularity of cities increasing, small town and rural private institutions will face ever greater challenges in enrolling students. Some of these institutions will undoubtedly be forced to close because of low enrollment.

Okay, last question. Given your extensive background leading an urban university— one which has come in for well-deserved praiseon the national stage — I wonderedwhat insights and/or lessons from that experience shaped the book, and your perspective on the future?

As dean and then chancellor of Rutgers University-Newark, I put great energy into attracting faculty with scholarly interests in cities and in encouraging faculty to use the resources of the city for their teaching and research. I started an Honors college in which we recruited students with strong academic records for a program that gave them extensive opportunities to connect with major civic, corporate and cultural institutions in Newark. I became deeply involved in Newark, serving on the boards of many organizations. So in researching this book, I looked closely at how universities in the past engaged with their cities and how it changed over time.

In the book, I discuss the resistance of established state universities to the creation of new urban institutions like UCLA, U. Mass-Boston, University of Illinois-Chicago and many others. My attention to this issue clearly grew out of my frustrations with the leadership of Rutgers-New Brunswick, whose president I reported to. As noted above, the New Brunswick administrator in charge of university housing vigorously resisted new housing construction in Newark. He insisted that the demand for new housing was insufficient despite the fact that a study by the leading national organization on campus housing concluded that the demand for housing was greater than the housing we were planning.

In short, my deep engagement with Newark and my vision of strengthening and expanding my institution clearly shaped the questions I posed in Universities and Their Cities.

The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of RevolutionBy Mike RapportBasic Books (May 2017)​416 pg.

Reviewed by Miriam Liebman

In recent years, scholars have published numerous books on the Age of Revolutions and the connections between the countries involved; usually the United States, Great Britain, and France. These books have focused on people and ideas. But in The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of Revolution, Mike Rapport, a professor of modern European history at the University of Glasgow, takes a different approach, focusing instead on the geography of “the city” and how it may or may not have been more conducive to revolution. Venturing into the transatlantic history of revolution, he is concerned principally with the importance of place to success and failure. In particular, he is interested in how “spaces and buildings in these cities both symbolically and physically became places of conflict, how the cityscape itself became part of the experience of revolution and may even have helped shaped its course.” For Rapport, space itself has agency, which in this study has two meanings: a specific place, or the city itself. The Unruly City explores not only how New York City’s (and London’s and Paris’s) landscape propelled and hindered revolution, but also how people interacted with the urban geography.

By looking at cities, Rapport can include people of all socioeconomic classes, which makes for a more balanced understanding of how revolution affected different groups, especially the lower classes. Rapport argues that the inhabitants of these metropoles shared a political culture which connected their revolutionary experiences. Many of the chapters reflect this belief, analyzing the reactions of one to another’s city’s experiences. The revolutionaries are situated in a cosmopolitan, Enlightened Atlantic world. Clearly, the aim is to show how cities themselves fit into our narrative about the Age of Democratic Revolutions.

While there is a tradition of comparing Paris, London and New York, their differences are equally as important. But according to Rapport, they changed the very trajectory of revolution in each city. Three sets of chapters treat each in roughly the same time period (the first addressing the 1760s and ‘70s, the second the 1770s and ‘80s, the final the 1780s and ‘90s). This organization allows the reader to get a “real time” developmental sense of what happened in each city during the Age. The method also enables Rapport to highlight the connections between the cities; for example, how news and ideas traveled from one to another. He is most successful with his chapter on New York and the French Revolution, tracing how different groups of people reacted to the French Revolution and showing its transatlantic impact. Indeed, the final three chapters, as each city reckons with the events in France, are the richest and most exciting. Rapport traces revolution, and counterrevolution, throughout the cities, taking the reader from location to location, and even down individual streets, providing the reader with an on-the-ground experience.

His conclusions may be the most valuable part, with far-reaching historiographical significance. There are three major takeaways. First, revolution is in part about the takeover of physical space. The struggle for physical spaces are part of the revolutionary experience and the ones who win also take over the physical spaces. For example, fighting for control of Paris or the Loyalist expulsion from New York City. Second, revolutions that go beyond political ones will also imprint changes on the urban landscape in order to display the changes to citizens, which meant displaying new symbols. In New York, the American eagle was fixed on building while in Paris, the Phrygian bonnet was placed on buildings. Finally, revolutions do not occur just within spaces, but also across space, which can mean across neighborhoods and cities. While London did not experience the same changes as New York and Paris, it did experience a surge in political organization and engagement in spaces throughout the city, including bookshops and other meeting places. Rapport believes these three cities transformed the Atlantic world, even the modern world. References appear to cities during World War II, although, oddly, not to Haiti or Latin America. (Rapport says in his introduction that he will not include these places because they do not have cities with the political, economic, and cultural authority that New York, London and Paris had at the end of the eighteenth century.) One could argue, however, that New York did not have the same political, economic, and social capital that London and Paris, two very old cities, had at the outbreak of revolution.

Unlike most academic books on this topic, Rapport seems to focus his narrative towards a popular audience. Graduate students and experts in the field will not find the historiography up-to-date or the narrative particularly new. The cityscape often falls out of focus as politics takes its place, unless Rapport is writing about a specific example. This sometimes has the effect of nullifying or diluting his argument that space was an essential ingredient of those politics. The best examples are the liberty pole in New York and the Bastille in Paris; here the politics and changing cityscape directly impacted one another. By looking at spaces, however, not people or ideas, the transatlantic nature of the project also gets lost at times, only returning to view when one city deals with another’s revolution. But for those interested in exciting revolutionary times who would like to understand the similarities and differences between these three world famous cities, this book is a great starting place.

Miriam Liebman is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.